I briefly touched on the realm of spamming when I decided to look into adding content, or more specifically value, to my twitter accounts. I strung several RSS feeds into usable outputs that helped me transmit new blog posts moments after they are posted. To my surprise, this worked very well and I wanted more.

This automation feature is a great addition to my social realm. As I wrote in “@HootSuite and the Social Media captive” ( http://ow.ly/12rvG ), I explained that monitoring feeds can be exhausting, especially when finding content that could relate to others. @HootSuite allows for this RSS/Atom feed monitoring but also limits the feed area to 10 feeds. As this may be plenty of room for a modest twitterer, I found 10 feeds were not enough. Let me explain…

My need is to semi-automate a Twitter account (@AgileColumbus ) to spawn interest in others in the area on Agile Development and Methods. (note This account has been active for 4 months with hardly any use. I thought @HootSuite would be great to get info from blogs out there for others in one location). This would also help me, too! As I follow this feed I would stay on top of some of my favorite bloggers who lead this methodology and at the same time add “value” to a Twitter account to help others dive deeper into agile development and other notable methods.

Ok. So, I have a problem. I have 8 blogs bookmarked. I also feed my blog posts and other notable blogs into my twitter account and that is more than @HootSuite would allow. #spamfail 😉

So when @HootSuite recommended Yahoo Pipes I was eager to try something new. My knowledge of RSS and other feedburner-esque sites is very limited but I was sure it would not be an issue and it turns out it is very EASY. I went to yahoo.pipes.com and jumped right in…

Immediately, I am intimidated. The first line I read is “Pipes is a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web.” This is exactly what I was looking for.

I went directly to the main page. Logged in using my Yahoo! account and selected “Create a pipe” and called it “Agile Feeds”. The GUI is awesome. It is clean and I feel like I can do something really cool here and I was right.

I dragged the visual component “Fetch Feed” over to graph paper area and started adding RSS/Atom feed URL’s just like @HootSuite. Once I was finished adding the URLs in the ‘easy to use’ feed window, I dragged the small blue circle on the bottom of the Fetch Feed box and dragged it over to “Pipe Output”. Click save and it returns a URL that links to the Pipe. SWEET, all your feeds from one link and only one spot from @HootSuite is used.

In the end, visit My Pipes and go to your created pipe. Once it loads, click ‘Get RSS’ and copy that URL on the page.

Take the URL from Yahoo Pipes to @HootSuite and add it as a RSS/Atom feed and then DONE!

Pretty sweet! I know Pipes has potential to run conditional statements, do math and all kinds of automation to many things. Can you think of any other uses?

About the Author

I am a husband to a beautiful wife named Whitney and Dad to a wonderful baby boy. Yay! :) Damien Augustus Shaffer has come into this world on March 15th 2010.
In my professional life, I have accumulated over 4 years utilizing a wide range of technologies to develop software solutions for my current employer. Most of this time was spent learning methodical approaches within different environments to broaden my programming knowledge and project planning abilities. These environments include both open source and Windows based development, mainly Web.
I also dabble in Social Media and it applications in today's culture and marketplace. I consider it a hobby but some may say its an obsession. ;) I enjoy it immensely.